Archive for the 'Nostalgia' Category

As we slide deeper into the quadrennial football madness I get seized with a major case of Nostalgia. I played football as kid in Poland, but pretty much stopped when I moved to the US. Now I rarely think about football… except during the World Cup every four years. Above is the only football related illustration I ever drew (I think?). It was for the beautifully designed Green Soccer Journal. It maybe the best looking sports publication ever! It was a pretty fun assignment. And now it can the perfect gift for a FIFA World Cup obsessed football fan! The only other time I referred to football in print was in this very old (1996) comic (reprinted in Cartoon Dialectics 2). Who are you rooting for?

I pilfered these from Graham Harman‘s blog. Graham is right, this is one of the best songs to emerge from an evil dictatorship.

I love both versions, but this second one opens up a Soviet sized nostalgia zone in my head… even though I’ve never heard this song before. All the notes this songs hits are familiar and mysterious at the same time.

When I was a kid in Poland I was a big Soccer fan. I loved watching the game, and I loved playing it even more. When I moved to the USA Soccer fell quickly fell off my radar. I was filled with a nostalgic thrill when The Green Soccer Journal asked me to contribute an illustration. The above is the final result. See the illustration in context here.

I came to the United States From Poland in 1987. I’ve traveled back to the home country a few times over the last couple of decades. A few days ago I had a different kind of homecoming. I was interviewed for the first time by the Polish comics community. The brief interview is now posted, along with a few pages of my comics, on the Aleja Komiksu site.
If you read Polish the rest of the Aleja Komiksu site is well worth checking. I especially recommend the extensive interview with Andrzej Klimowski, one of the most interesting figures in British comics. English speakers aren’t completely left out. The site posted a survey of recent comics by young British cartoonists. Take a look.
To celebrate this virtual homecoming, I’m posting one of my first ever comic-books. It may not be THE first comic, but it’s certainly the first total package: a stapled pamphlet, complete with a logo and print run number (it was customary for the print run to be listed on books in Poland at the time – in this case the print run was 1). I was 11 when I made this.

This song has been in my head all day. I finally decided to find it online. Here it is:

It’s called ‘Солнечный круг’ (Solar Cycle). It’s better known to many as ‘Пусть всегда будет солнце!’ (May There Always Be Sunshine). It’s an anti-war song. If you grew up in Eastern Europe (or at least around Eastern European emigrants) you most likely have this song seared into your head. I posted the lyrics in English below the fold.

It’s probably been over 20 years since I heard this song… well, outside of my head that is… Hearing it again is like being hit with a ton of nostalgic bricks. But what really struck me were the visuals of the videos. The second one especially has all the hallmarks of Socialist Realism. And, yet… they are so… well… American. Besides some minor differences in clothing, and the like, the whole thing wouldn’t have been out of place in the US… at least in that timeless-Norman-Rockwell-eternally-50’s-LIFE-Magazine-innocent-Leave-It-To-Beaver U S of A that still grips the popular (and political) imagination.

I’m often struck by an uncanny sense of déjà vu whenever I watch American politics unfold on TV. The discourse is carefully circumscribed by what can or cannot be said in public about the economy, socialism, Islam, Israel, etc. The 2008 campaign was only the most recent example of that. As much as I like and support Obama, I’m still bothered by the slick visuals his campaign saturated the airwaves with. For all the soaring rhetoric (and yes rhetoric matters) and ‘straight talk’, everything is still directed at saving Capitalism (with a hefty dose of socialism if need be… but shhhh). Socialist Realism is the term used for art which furthered the goals of socialism and communism. Until the Soviet collapse, it was the officially approved style of art for decades. How long does Capitalist Realism have?

The Blog is an immature medium. The Blog is a collaborative medium by the virtue of existing on the internet. It’s hard to imagine a Blog that is hermetically self-sufficient. Its nature is to be linked-to or to link-elsewhere. In fact the Blog is a reminder that writing, in general, is a collaborative act. It’s something we forget all too often‚Ä¶ probably as a side effect of the dominance of books. Books are physical objects; self-contained, solid and finite. They tend to make us possessive of characters, concepts, and ideas. Blogs are diffuse, porous, entangled‚Ä¶ The Blog auteur (if such a creature exists) is like the film auteur. S/he needs to be able to incorporate other influences (actors, assistant directors, producers, etc. or other posts, comments, articles in the case of Blogs) and still get his/her vision across. But it’s no longer a vision that exists in the vacuum sealed world of our heads. Blogging is essentially sharing. This is by necessity a truncated list. There are millions of Blogs out there and there are many great ones that are not on this list. Here’s my list of the best Blogs of 2008.Click Opera by Momus. Momus is Perhaps the closet thing to a Blog auteur out there. At least in my humble opinion. The Blog is full of an impressive range of topics. Unusual magazines. Paranoid architecture. Ancestral time-travel. Digital potlatch. I also really like Momus’ non-prioprietary sharing of his creative process. Readings from unfinished books, recording diaries & demos serve as direct portals into the mind of the artist.BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh. This is an architecture Blog that dispenses with starchitects and prominent buildings (though there is some of that as well) and instead focuses on the overlooked: stabilized ruins, cloud projections, fortifications tourism, liberation hydrology, underwater archaeology‚Ä¶Beyond the Beyond by Bruce Sterling. This Blog is probably the closest to a link aggregator on the list. Most of the posts point to places and events reported on elsewhere. That doesn’t mean that Bruce Sterling doesn’t pepper his posts with insightful commentary. He does. But that’s not necessarily the point. He reminds me of Cayce Pollard (from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition). Cayce is a trend hunter. She is able to zero-in on apparently insignificant events and recognizes them as signs of larger trends. Beyond the Beyond reveals a similar ability in it’s author. Bits of information plucked from chaotic sea of random information are exposed as instances of the future already existing in our time.No Fear of the Future by Chris Nakashima-Brown and others. No Fear of the Future is a group science-fiction (a nexus of speculative word & thought) Blog. While all the writers are interesting as well, Chris has been mining an especially interesting vein of ideas on utopia and the apocalypse. When you add posts on Ballardian economic indicators, weaponized Segways and deconstructed (post-structural?) Gaza among many others, you’ve got the makings of a compulsive reading experience.
SCAB Construction by Lebbeus WoodsLebbeus Woods. The visionary ‘paper architect’ made a very successful transition into digital aether. His Blog is teeming with ideas, architectural fiction, impressive guests, and above all, drawings. Will a re(de)constructed Gaza look something like architectural SCAB above?

Most of these books haven’t actually been published in 2008. But, I read them in 2008 so they’re here.The Red Atlantis by J. Hoberman. It’s been less than 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and it’s cultural output already resembles impenetrable artifacts from an ancient lost civilization. This book is a great archaeology of Soviet culture in general (and Soviet cinema in particular) refracted through the prism of an American film critic.Schulz & Peanuts by David Michaelis. A towering figure like Charles Schulz will have his life written (and re-written) several times over and I look forward to future efforts. This one was very readable if somewhat controversial. It was especially interesting to get a glimpse of Schulz’s Minneapolis and St. Paul‚Ä¶ even if it meant weeping over so many great things the Twin Cities lost to time and the automobile.The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. Van Vogt. A sci-fi novel by the author the the amazing Slan that takes the right to bear arms to an insane extreme. A kind of libertarian dream/nightmare where individuals are protected by magical all-powerful weapons (which can be used in defense only) against the entire might of an interplanetary empire.The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick. This was the secret history of the US 2008 election written by a precog in 1966. An African-American runs for the presidency of the United States and promises to solve the world’s problems by opening up a space-time rift. Sound like Obama?The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This Road is hard to write about. I think I agree with Steven Shaviro that it “actively repels commentary.” Still, it lingers in my head so it makes the list.Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling. This one was a genuine surprise to me. I was aware of Bruce Sterling more as futurist and commentator but I’d never read his science-fiction before. Now I plan to read more. Data havens, ubiquitous networking, single cell protein cheaply mass produced in “vats swarming with bacteria” (aka. scop), nuclear terrorism, mysterious insurgency manuals, etc. The novel felt really relevant to the current world wide situation despite having been published in 1988.Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray. This is an extremely anti-utopian book. John Gray lays out the case that much of the evil done in the the world is done in the name of the greatest good. The “utopian” projects of the 20th century turned into minor apocalypses in the hands of Hitler, Stalin, Neocons, etc. It’s hard to disagree with him… for the most part. While reading this book one gets the idea that John Gray takes all the utopian sounding rhetoric (for example of Neocons’ project of global capitalist gunboat democracy) at face value, as genuinely utopian, instead of a cynical ideological ploy to mask imperialist projects. In the book he calls for more dystopias (1984 etc.) because utopias have gotten us so consistently in trouble. I would say that it’s precisely utopias that are missing today. We have no problem with imagining apocalyptic futures, but we have lost the ability to imagine positive alternatives to the dystopia of now.
Which is why I enjoyed In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek so much. He takes the exact opposite position to John Gray and argues for the triumphant return of the universal. Actually, I shouldn’t say that I didn’t enjoy Black Mass, I did. But it was a very antagonistic enjoyment.
Next: Blogs

sophiafosterdimino:Here are my 2015 hourlies. It took me two days to ink them rather than two weeks, as it did the last time I managed to do them (two years ago).Lots of people did great hourly comics this year, I haven’t even managed to catch up on them all, but here’s a quick assortment of […]

Simon Moreton’s new book, Plans We Made, has seen a successful run on Kickstarter. With a day left to fund, the book is beyond its initial funding goal, sitting beautifully just above seven thousand dollars. While the book will be nationally distributed this Fall, there’s still time to support the Kickstarter and pre-order a copy […]

Critical Cartoons is a book series and blog banner dedicated to comics criticism. To mark the release of Peter Schilling Jr.’s Carl Bark’s Duck, we present companion pieces to offer a little more on the subject of Carl Barks and all things Duck. by Peter Schilling Jr. As an artist seemingly obsessed with stories about earning […]

This is it (really). This weekend if your LAST chance to subscribe to our Spring 2015 season. You’ll get Borb, True Swamp: Book 2 and Robot Investigator from Jason Little, Jon Lewis and Vincent Stall (plus, 3 mini comics!). The subscription is only $55. View the deal on our website.

James (Post York) Romberger conducted a great interview with artist Tonci Zonjic. Zonjic is fairly well-known for his work on Dark Horse Comics’ Lobster Johnson and his Image book, Who is Jake Ellis?. It’s an excuse for two artists obviously influenced by Alex Toth to chat about Toth, and Zonjic has some smart things to say […]